Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Shimmering in the late summer sun: giant Kelpies land on Chicago's Lakefront

When we first wrote aboutAndy Scott's The Kelpies last March, the 10-foot-high maquettes for the 100-foot-high sculptures being erected by the River Carron in Scotland were on display at Edinburgh Airport.

The two horse heads, fabricated of mosaics of interconnected steel plates, have now made their way to Chicago, to the great lawn that separates the Field Museum from the lakefront promenade.

Even at one-tenth scale, they're pretty spectacular, and there's a small steel human figure on one of the bases to give you an even better idea of the size of the actual sculptures. The maquettes are part of this year's Chicago Sculpture International, and are expected to be in place for the next twelve months,

You can read all about how the sculptures were fabricated, how they will be inhabited, and the myth of Kelpies as mythical beasts haunting Scottish waterways, luring riders onto their backs, only to be plunged to the river bottom and drowned (consider taking the Wendella instead) - all in our original post, here.

Step back a few paces and see them confidently take their place among the icon towers of Chicago's skyline.

About Me

. . . writings on architecture have appeared in the Chicago Reader, Metropolis Magazine, the Harvard Design Magazine, and the backs of discarded gum wrappers.
We reserve the right to delete posts that we judge spamatory, defamatory or unnecessarily obscene. If you prefer to berate me personally, email me here.